A weblog of chaotic sports analysis

Back-to-Back Away Games

There’s an old adage in the NBA about how difficult the second night of a back-to-back game is. Mark Cuban even dedicated some research to it a few years ago. The Boston Celtics appealed to the league to change part of their recent West Coast trip because traveling 1,000 miles from Portland to Phoenix for a day game seemed too extreme. (Boston scored a season-low 71 points and lost by 18 to the Suns.) And after the Utah Jazz sleepwalked through the end of their recent road trip, I wondered how travel affected this equation.

As of Feb 6. there have been 755 NBA games played this year. In 250, the road team has been on the second night of a back-to-back. To date (in 2011), home-court advantage has been worth about 2.9 points per game. But when we compare how away teams perform without a night of rest versus at least one night off, the differences are noticeable:

Away Team Rest

Net points per game

None

-3.9

1+ Day

-2.4

A statistically significant difference by my quick calculations (if we use traditional alpha values). 1.5 points should not be scoffed at either – it’s essentially spotting the home team a bucket, or in terms of margin of victory, the difference right now between Memphis (27-25) and New Orleans (32-20).

Given this trend, we can now look at team schedules based on road back-to-backs. And thanks to the awesome NBAStuffer.com, we can even look at opponent’s back-to-back road games (click the “Opponent’s Rest Day” tab above the list of teams). Ideally, this type of information could be incorporated into strength of schedule, and ultimately something like SRS.

Teams with most back-to-back road games in 2011 (league avg. 13.8, median 14):

Portland (18)

Dallas (17)

Orlando (17)

Atlanta (16)

Houston (16)

Indiana (15)

Denver (15)

Golden State (15)

New Orleans (15)

Teams with fewest back-to-back road games in 2011:

Phoenix (8)

Chicago (11)

Utah (11)

Milwaukee (11)

Charlotte (12)

Minnesota (12)

Detroit (12)

Sacramento (13)

Miami (13)

Teams with the most opponent’s back-t0-back road games in 2011:

Milwaukee (21)

Chicago (20)

Washington (19)

Houston (19)

Cleveland (17)

Charlotte (17)

Phoenix (17)

San Antonio (17)

Detroit (17)

Teams with the fewest opponent’s back-to-back road games in 2011:

New York (6)

LA Lakers (7)

Orlando (9)

Toronto (9)

Indiana (10)

Golden State (11)

Philadelphia (11)

New Jersey (11)

Schedule Adjusting

Finally, if we treat a road back-to-back as a 1.5-point advantage, we can make the following adjustments to SOS at the end of the season (positive number increases schedule strength):

New York, Orlando and the Lakers have the worst back-to-back road schedules when we include their opponents rest days as well. Worthy of a small adjustment in SOS. On the flip side, the schedule-makers were kinder to teams like Chicago, Phoenix and Milwaukee, all of whom benefit from fewer road back-to-backs while hosting more unrested opponents than average.